A friend of a friend here in Portland started a Sunrise Coffee Club back in the early fall. It’s been a lot of fun so I thought I’d take a moment to share its simple pleasure in a modest hope of inspiring a person or two to do the same in their own hometown. The premise is simple enough: get up early, ride out to a pleasant public access site, brew up a cup of coffee, and enjoy the sunrise with some friends.

Unless you’re already a morning person, the biggest difficulty is overcoming the inertia to get out of bed an hour or more earlier than normal. Friends help immeasurably here, hence a club. Finding a quorum for the club might seem to be another difficulty, but in my experience wild schemes, done right, take on a life of their own. If you sell it properly (questioning another man’s vigor being the most reliable method) getting a quorum for the first meeting shouldn’t be too difficult. After the first meeting, the founding members can brag about the fun they had (take pictures) making subsequent rides reasonably easy to raise a quorum for. Also, to clarify, two is an entirely acceptable quorum for a sunrise coffee club.

As to the virtues of the club, the biggest is that it gets one out on the bike when seasonality would otherwise be conspiring against it. In fact, the beauty of Sunrise Coffee Club is its counter-cyclical nature. The harder it is to get out on the bike, the easier it is to make sunrise. As I write, winter solstice was just a couple days ago. The difficulty now is not getting up early enough, but getting to work on time after taking in the sunrise. Another nice part of coffee club is it gives an excellent excuse to dust off the camping stove and portable coffee maker. I know I don’t get to use mine enough. I doubt I’m very much alone with this lament. Double bonus if your club becomes so popular as to justify upgrading some part of your kit. Finally, anything that gets folks out on bikes building community with friends and fellow company is a good thing we can always stand to have more of in this world.

I’ll try and get a post up on the 2014 touring season soon. If I don’t get to it, however, be assured I am running the shuttle this year. Feel free to send me an email with any inquires you might have. I’m also on twitter, mostly sharing personal ride pictures and occasional dry humor, if you’re into that sort of thing.